Rainer’s Early Shorts
Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer
July 21 - 27, 2017
This program features Rainer’s first forays into filmmaking, each of which grapples with how to use the performer as a medium rather than a persona.
Hand Movie (1966, 5m)
Volleyball (Foot Film) (1967, 10m)
Rhode Island Red (1968, 10m)
Trio Film (1968, 13m)
Line (1969, 10m)
This program brings together Rainer’s first forays into filmmaking, each of which grapples with one of the central aesthetic concerns of her early work: how to use the performer as a medium rather than a persona. Hand Movie enacts a small-scale composition where the fingers become the dancers; Volleyball (Foot Film), in turn, records an intimate pas de deux between a set of legs, shot from the knees down, and the rolling, leatherbound object of the title. Rhode Island Red, filmed in a crowded chicken coop, proceeds as a kind of mass choreography, while Becky Arnold and Steve Paxton are joined by an oversized balloon to complete the threesome in Trio Film. Finally, Line is a clever experiment in scale that, as art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has argued, complicated the received parameters of minimalism and inaugurated Rainer’s artistic engagement with feminism.
Copyright of Yvonne Rainer, courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image copyright of Yvonne Rainer, courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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